Deaf Awareness Month and Hispanic Heritage Month
Happy September from the COS Access and Belonging team!
Please consider joining and sharing the following opportunities this month:
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Join the 2026 Excellence in STEM Teaching and Learning Cohort. The cohort will include faculty and postdocs from across the College and is a great opportunity to connect with new colleagues, discuss challenges, and develop best practices for our classrooms and research labs. We meet in-person every two weeks in the fall and spring semesters, for a total of about 15 one-hour workshops. We’ll discuss challenges like microaggressions and stereotype threat, identities like race and gender, and approaches for handling tough conversations with students. Email Lea to join!
- Share the Grad Student Extended Orientation Series that launches this month. Invite your students and send us suggestions for topics to support our new grad students to hit the ground running.
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Resource highlight:
Check out our Accessible Meetings Cheat Sheet for tips on making your meetings better for everyone! It includes tips on everything from Access Services to dietary restrictions and facilitation norms.
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Representation highlight:
This month, we’re observing Deaf Awareness Month (September) and Hispanic Heritage Month (9/15-10/15). Where possible and appropriate, we encourage you to uplift Deaf and Hispanic identities in your classes, offices, and labs this month, and especially, to highlight Deaf and Hispanic scholars.
Our representation spotlight this month is Ahira Sánchez-Lugo.
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Dr. Sánchez-Lugo is a climate scientist with the National Centers for Environmental Information at NOAA. In her role, she analyzes national and global datasets on weather and meteorological phenomena to understand climate change and advocate for effective policy interventions. She also works to create pathways for more Hispanic scholars to enter the field of climate science, sharing information about her work experiences and advocating for Spanish-language information dissemination. To learn more about Dr. Sánchez-Lugo’s life and work, check out this article from the Asheville Citizen Times or her guest episode on the podcast Every Day is Earth Day.
If you want to find other scientists to highlight in your class this month, we encourage you to visit resources like the Deaf Scientist Corner and www.scientistspotlights.org. Scientist Spotlights is an initiative that collects information to make it easy to highlight scientists of various identities in classrooms of all levels.
Have a wonderful month and thanks for reading!
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